and reap the whirlwind. They each create crimes where they do not exist, and nurture them wherever they exist.

Infidelity, an apologist for free license to do as you please, would remove the restraints of religion and morals from the propensities of the wicked.

Intemperance has so branded its victims in society, that the government in taking the last census discovered "one million habitual drunkards." From other sources we find that from seventy-five thousand to one hundred thousand drunkards die each year. Nine hundred millions of dollars are spent annually in the liquor business. There are about 65,000,000 inhabitants in the United States. This means one in every sixty-five is an habitual drunkard. But nearly or quite one-third of our population are twenty-one years of age or under. As few minors or children are habitual drunkards, we have a proportion of about one to forty-four of our adult inhabitants, habitual drunkards.

Then, sad thought! the majority of these million habitual drunkards are parents, bringing a tainted race into the world. Many of the children of to-day, then, have inherited appetites for strong drink. With open saloons upon every side, and a weak public sentiment against the drink curse, a free, open bid for the ruin of these birth-cursed ones is made in open day.

These figures and facts, awful though they be, are silent as to the harvest of crimes, poverty, and want flowing from this seed sowing of intemperance and folly. No word is mentioned of the hundreds of thousands of homes wrecked, or the women degraded by squalor and shame. The millions of children of these drunken parents seem to awaken no voice in their behalf. The chivalry that strikes for helpless women and innocent, defenseless children has been palsied by the mockish sentiment that "the drink curse has come to stay, and nothing can be successfully done to remove its ravages." Many professing Christians will not refrain from the use of wines and liquors as beverages for their brethren's sake, although the curse of intemperance enters the very fold of the house of God, to number its victims. The reckless saloon-keeper is encouraged, shielded,

and sustained by the patronage of so-called reputable citizens; while political bosses stand in the shadow of death to collect assessments out of this blood money.

Let political bosses take their hands off of the superintendent and police force, and leave them free to enforce the law, and the manly instincts of the entire force would soon drive these crime-breeders into dark corners and narrow limits. Instead, the corrupt saloon is a pap for politicians to fatten upon. Assessments must be paid regularly, from saloon, dive, gambling hell, and disorderly house, to enable political bosses to live without work, and carry each election for party ends, and against the rights of the people.

The gambling hell takes its place beside the saloon, oftentimes within the very precincts of the saloon. Brothels surround the saloon and the low playhouses, even as "the mountains are round about Jerusalem."

The policy shop and the pool room are doing tenfold more harm to the rising generation than all the faro banks and roulette tables in the country. Into the poisonous air of a policy shop, children from tenement houses, wives of laboring men (crazed with the idea that they can make something in these haunts of crime), drop their pennies to enrich this meanest of all mean gamblers. Our young men are drawn in, to associate with some of the worst elements of society, by the offers of great return for small investments. The policy shop, pool room, and race track are taking from the hands of the poor the money that should buy bread for starving children.

In raiding policy shops in the city of New York, it is no uncommon sight to see little girls and boys, hardly as high as the counter over which the policy writer does his business, come in with a piece of paper with numbers upon it, which some crazed man or woman desires to bet, and a few pennies accompanying this play, tightly clasped in their hands; and I have more than once seen these little tots reach up and deposit their numbers and money into the hands of men whom we were about to arrest.

The curse of horse-race gambling is worse to-day in our land than the poisonous miasma of the Louisiana lottery. More homes are wrecked, more young men ruined, more embezzlements, more defalcations, thefts, robberies, breaches of trust, suicides, and murders result each year from pool gambling and betting on horse racing than ever were known to exist in the palmiest days of the Louisiana octopus, which for a quarter of a century hung suspended over this nation.

Easy-going citizens may shut their eyes, if they will, to the awful harvest gathered by this nation from the corruption of youth by intemperance, evil reading, and gambling.

Simply because people will not stop and reflect, because they will not admit what is apparent to every thoughtful man and woman, does not remove the curse, nor make the harvest of these crime-breeders any the less terrible to this nation. Nor does it stop the dread consequences of the future or its awful results. To sum it up in a word, the tolerating of these crimebreeders is every year calling for more judges and courts to try the criminals created by them, more grand juries, and longer terms of service for each session of the court. Each year there must be an additional tax to provide for more police officers — more peace officers. Annually there must be an enlargement of reformatories, penitentiaries, states prisons, jails, hospitals, almshouses, while paupers' graves multiply.

What mockery! what absurdity! what short-sightedness it is to employ in a great city a large army of peace officers, and then, by the same token that appoints these officers to power, that uniforms them and pays their salaries, authorize crimebreeding establishments to open their doors to tempt our young men from paths of virtue and honesty; and to lay traps for the feet of those who have been cursed by an inherited appetite for strong drink, or tendency to wrongdoing.

In other words, to appoint a policeman to patrol the sidewalk, and then line his beat with saloons that degrade manhood, dethrone reason, fire the brain and passions, and turn men from sober, industrious, bread earners, to victims crazed by the

drink curse, who, when fired out of the saloon upon the officers' beat, are either taken to jail, to be provided for at public expense, or sent home in this mad condition of mind to vent their wrath upon the noble women and helpless children that dwell beneath the roof which they once provided as a home for their loved

ones.

Intemperance, gambling, and evil reading are as parasites that are boring into the hull of the ship of state. They are microbes of contagion, and are sending more deadly disease into the community than can be charged to smallpox, scarlet fever, Asiatic cholera, or any other of the dread contagions against which this nation has wisely quarantined its ports.

Because of the seed sowing of these crime-breeding monsters, we are growing up an undergrowth of criminals. Children are born into the world with criminal propensities.

Over and above each of these foul and vicious monstersoutgrowths of man's greed comes the shriek of the infidel, removing the restraints of religion and morals from the propensities of the wicked; blasphemously crying out, "No God," "No hope of heaven," "No eternity."

The remedy for all these calamities that are growing up in our midst, casting a dark shadow over the future of this nation, is the cleansing of the heart of man by the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ, the turning of this nation unto God, and the exalting of his word in the hearts of the children. With the conversion of sinners unto God must also come, as an imperative duty and necessity, the stopping of the devil's seed sowing for evil. We must prevent the crushing out of moral and religious sentiment, through the saloon, gambling hell, and by the devil's printing press. If we would stop crimes, we must stop crimebreeding. In order to prevent a criminal harvest, we must stop that seed sowing which germinates crime.

"Be not deceived; God is not mocked; for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap."

Chasing Fickle Fortune.

REV. JAMES W. COLE, B.D.

T is often a great misfortune to have a fortune.

"They

who seek for riches fall into temptations and snares, and many foolish and hurtful desires which drown men in ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all evil.” It is too often reckoned the chief end of life to get much of it. Men search sea and land to find it. They endure untold privations to obtain it. Women are eager to marry it. Health is sacrificed for it. Morality is flung away to gain it. Honor is counted as naught in the wild rush for it. It is the century's badge of heraldry, the insignia of rank, the key that opens the doors of privilege and preference. Men look at all things through gold-suffused eyes. Everywhere the multitudes are clamoring for gold. "Give us gold," is the well-nigh universal cry as attested by the universal seeking. America is pre-eminently a land of gold. But great wealth in the hands of a few invariably breeds trouble.

Money is a concentrated and centralized power in politics, while the power of the masses is too often scattered, diffused, and dissipated. As a result, wealth often elects its legislators and enacts laws favorable to itself, and is now steadily reducing government to a science for making money. In consequence we have now in this country two wide extremes of society, the millionaire and the tramp. Deep poverty is as unfavorable to morality as great wealth. And when these two extremes of the body politic,-the tramp and the millionaire, become hopelessly diseased, the body must die. The mortification at the extremities will destroy life at the center. To oppress men, whether by law or custom, sinks them to a low level. To pam